Poll Technica: how do you feel about the weekend wrap-ups?

Our week in review posts are very popular, or are they? Check out what we've …

When the weekend comes, so does the “week in review” news posts on Ars. We’ve been doing them by topic (e.g., week in gaming, week in Apple) for 1 year, usually on Saturdays. We look at our traffic, select the most read stories for that week, and present them in one place. For those who write them, they take little effort.

And, well, some of you hate the posts. Typically when you guys complain about something we produce, we can see corresponding weakness in traffic levels. But with the week in review posts, we get a strong number of complaints, but also a very strong level of traffic.

One reason for this discrepancy is that most Ars readers visit the site at least once a day, and so the content in those posts is old news to you and you’re not finding things you missed. Yet, the point of those posts isn’t to bring new content to you, but to point out stuff you might have missed. And it would appear that for a subset of our readers, this is very popular, because the traffic on them is very strong.

Before taking the poll, let me make a few things clear:

There's no opportunity cost here. If we stop doing these posts, they're not going to be replaced with more content.

We're definitely open to suggestions!

We break them into topics (one post for gaming, one for Apple, etc.) because they are more popular that way. If the "All-in-one" posts would get X views, the Apple or gaming (etc.) posts would get X+50% more, each.

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

My only suggestion would be to disable comments on the wrap-ups. Not that the wrap-ups gather many comments but when they do, they're segmented from the original discussion that probably already covered that ground (many times over most likely)

I really like the way kottke.org revisits his posts and notes little updates that have occurred in the days following. I think I'd like to see more of that caled out in the Week-in-Review posts. Since Monday, EA has responded with, "blah blah" or something.

I think they're fine (though redundant for me too), but I disagree with their placement. I definitely don't want them appearing in the featured section up top (leave that space for actual journalism, please) and they annoy me by taking up all the article space above the fold. I'd say give them a different font color for emphasis and keep them in the journal section.

It depends. If I was around during the week then I read the individual articles and skip the weeklys. If I was away from the net (vacation) then I like them a lot as a rapid way to get the gist of what's happened while I was not around.

I wouldn't mind them otherwise, but as I follow Ars mainly via RSS, it's somewhat annoying to get these redundant items there. If I've missed something, I still have it marked as unread in my RSS reader.

FYI it seems like multiple votes are allowed on this poll. Not that I'm stacking or anything...

Re: adding 4 more stories, I think losing article space "above the fold" as simplicio says is the actual problem. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on exactly why they are so annoying, but every weekend my eyes involuntarily roll when they pop up.

There are a number of vocal minorities on the web that need to remember that they don't necessarily have to read each and every post on their free website.

Perhaps you can add a feature (or it exists already) for paid subscribers to filter out these types of posts. Otherwise, the people not paying cash for the site can just scroll a few extra lines further down the page.

They wouldn't be nearly so irritating if they weren't in the journals box too, (and that criticism goes for the whole set of front-page articles). Content-bumping there is a BIG problem since the last redesign.

I'm with the majority of posters here. I don't mind their existence, and have even used them from time to time. However, I really would prefer a way to ensure that they didn't show up on the front page. Perhaps simply a new section that would contain nothing but weeks in review, and filtering them off the front page.

I see their usefulness and I've even used them on occasion, but they also tend to clutter up the main stories, and knock other news to the bottom. For example, if a story comes in at the end of the week prior to weeks in review, it might not make it on the week in review list (since you are using the popularity of a post to determine the list), but it might be off the front page by the time I can read it.

In the end, it's not a big deal by any means, I'd read Ars either way, but doing it in a different way might make more sense.

Originally posted by Caesar:What I don't understand is the complaints about them, from what angle. I guess for me, I don't understand why people who don't want to read them can't just ignore them.

I haven't complained about them (though I did vote to dump them in the poll), so I'm not quite in the demographic you're talking about here, but...

Like many people on here, I've got a Google Reader feed set up, with about 300 feeds I keep track of. It's a lot of information...it's stressful to keep up with it, but because it helps out my job when I'm knowledgeable, I do it. As such, redundant information is just more stuff I have to sift through, which just adds to my frustration.

I do feel somewhat bad complaining about it, though -- Ken, you and your staff do a fantastic job and providing content, and your new subscriptor model (no ads!!!!) makes me very happy and thankful.

A single mongo review story, combined with the top stories idea you're pilfering from the comment above strikes me as a compromise, but either way you're still getting my money.

What a stupid poll, I don't use the week-end wrap-ups, but the only option in the poll offered to me is "no I don't like them". I'd rather see an extra option "keep them on their own separate RSS feed if they are useful to somebody".But frankly, in a world of news fed to us by the minute, a week-old newscast is probably useless for most people.

Count me among the RSS users who find them annoying because they are redundant. Though, come to think of it, I'm not sure they appeared in RSS this week. If they're gone from the RSS feed, I don't care. If they have to appear in RSS, the duplication is irritating.

I hate them because I read the articles throughout the week, and the wrap-ups give the impression that they are a replacement for weekend-material. Also with the wrap-ups for each of the sections, the posting seems to cover most of the news listing and covering up the articles is bad.

I like the wrap-ups because sometimes the week gets away on me and I miss things here and there. However, truth be told, I could simply look at the older articles which are easy to go through.

Given those reasons for love hate, I'd suggest scrapping them for articles on the weekend (yes, I understand why that isn't a choice). Also if you do decide to get rid of them, might I suggest that the article listing get date breaks put in, eg:

Originally posted by inducer77:If you decide to keep them, can we get an RSS feed that doesn't include them? I decide based on the RSS snippets what's interesting to me, and the wrap-up articles are just noise.

You guys think they're a good idea. The numbers say they're a good idea... Why are you asking us? That's like asking kids if they want ice cream or broccoli for dinner.

I really enjoy the wrap-ups. I visit a few times a week, but not every day so I regularly miss really interesting stuff. These let me catch up on that.

And as information overloaded as I am I like to take a break on the weekend and read some prefiltered content rather than sort through all of my headlines, press releases and filler stories. At least the wrap-up links are proven winners.

I don't see what this is costing the haters. They can just suck it up or move on to hat something else.

I don't care one way or the other. Unlike most of the people in this thread, I already have enough email/RSS stuff to deal with with my job and don't want "more stuff" coming into my mailbox(en), so I don't subscribe to the RSS feeds.

What I WOULD like to see or be told about (if it exists already), is a way to check off articles that I have already read so they aren't displayed on the front page anymore (unless they get an update, which would help me in that regard because I would know they were updated). That way, I can work through the articles and maybe even see some old stuff that might be interesting.